Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  It’s time to move away from the sales funnel and the customer decision journey. Instead, we must think about creating experience-driven touchpoints that go beyond the products or services we sell. We can’t restrict our efforts to what drives immediate sales leads, because that limits what we can do. Don’t focus on persuading and promoting in order to sell. Rather, think about enabling and empowering experiences.53

  The Michelin Green Guide series is a long-lived example of how to create a meaningful experience for an audience, whether or not they’re customers.54 What does Michelin sell? Tires. What is the experience they create? That of a travel partner. If you want to know about ferry tolls, sites to see, great places to eat, or find a hotel in your budget, the Green Guides have you covered.

  DEVELOPING AUDIENCE PERSONAS

  Who, exactly, are we creating these experiences for?

  We hear marketers time and again say, “We know who our audience is.”

  Our next question is always: “But do you?”

  Marketers file many things in their heads. Buyer personas are usually one of them. While we think that we know who our buyers are, going through the process of developing personas is one of the pillars in the content creation process. You have to know whom you’re addressing before you know what you should be saying. Otherwise, you have no idea what matters to them and what you can say that delivers value to them.

  In a world where customers are inundated with information and marketing messages, focusing on personas is key to capturing your audience’s attention. Not only do you need the attention of your audience—which you may or may not be able to get—you need the attention of the people who influence them.

  THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

  In the 1970s, marketers began trying to engage customers in new ways. Anyone remember McDonald’s collector glasses? Go back far enough, and you can find Ronald, the Hamburgler, Mayor McCheese, Officer Big Mac, Captain Crook, Grimace (the purple blob that stole milkshakes), and other fun characters you could add to your everyday dishware.

  Companies were looking for new ways to connect with customers when they weren’t in front of the counter or a sales person. We were in the infant stages of tapping the customer’s attention, during a time when they received a mere 500 marketing messages per day. Marketers were beginning to ingrain brands in our head, programming us to remember them and to connect emotionally. That marked the beginning of the shift from pure promotions to more subtle branded content.

  Twenty years later, Google stepped in. It was 1997. The Packers won the Super Bowl, South Park was in full swing, and Titanic won 11 Oscars. Companies were upping the ante by now, almost doubling the number of marketing messages that customers received each day.

  Today, we see 10,000-plus marketing messages from the time we wake up until our heads hit the pillow. They span more platforms more aggressively than ever before. Brands relentlessly try to grab our attention. We see TV screens when we get into a cab, get pop-up windows in our web browsers, and hear ads when we’re on hold for the dentist.

  The double-edged sword comes with the ease we have as publishers to generate content. We have an immediate opportunity to reach people, but so do our competitors. Today, it’s the experience that matters. We not only have to grab the attention of the audiences that matter to us, we have to hold it long enough so that we matter to them.

  To matter to our customers, we have to know them better than they know themselves. We have to study their problems, understand their pain, and predict where they need to go in the future. We can no longer simply play defense against what our competitors say. Instead, we must deliver value that leads customers where we know they need to go.

  Often companies use the voice of the customer to decide what content they’ll create. But what they don’t realize is that if they’re asking customers what they think, and then listening online for what they do, they’re just getting the same information as are all their competitors.

  Your job is especially challenging in the B2B world where statistics say that 67% of the customer journey is digital.55 Even worse, Corporate Visions points out that up to 60% of those sales situations end in “no decision,” meaning that customers stick with their current situation.56 They don’t believe the value of change overshadows the risk of staying with what they have, the known enemy.

  Therefore, we have to go above and beyond what customers are telling us they want, and understand them so well that we can see blind spots they don’t know they have—just as Visa has done by understanding the holistic picture of consumers and their engagement journey.

  WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

  Marketers need to realize that the buyer persona isn’t always the same as the audience persona. One of the goals of content marketing is to attract attention, and we’re trying to capture that attention and hold it. But we’re not always able to get direct access to buyers and influence them in ways that we’d like. When that’s the case, we have to look at the broader audience: who are all the people involved in the decision-making process and who influences them? If you can’t reach the buyer directly, reach the people who influence them.

  Take, for example, the audience for a university’s marketing efforts. At first glance, you’d probably say that it’s two groups: students and their parents, the people who actually “buy” from the university.

  But a much bigger audience actually influences the decisions that the students and parents make about where to go to school. These might include alumni; professors and other staff; local and state businesses that hire interns and graduates; the government (local, state, and federal), because it impacts things such as tuition rates and student loans; nonprofits that contribute through fundraising; sports franchises that support athletic teams; and so on.

  Take a minute to think about one of the main personas for your company. Who’s your top buyer? Now list all of the people—all of them—who might influence that buyer somewhere along the line. It could be someone in purchasing who checks references. It could be their administrative assistant, who’s a gatekeeper. Or, it might be the day-to-day user tapped by the CEO for hidden insights. List all of them.

  Now map these relationships out. Start with your main persona and then indicate who has influence on them by drawing different size circles and connecting them to your main persona. If someone has a lot of influence on your persona, make their circle bigger; if they’re more on the fringes but still part of the equation, make it smaller.

  Next, map out your main persona’s buying process. Ask yourself who’s involved in each step and when they enter the process. This includes the main persona(s) and the people who influence them.

  Going through this exercise will help you discover the true stakeholders outside of the traditional “chain of command” and how they influence each other. By recognizing this larger group of people and how they operate, you’ll be able to identify where you need to devote your time and attention.

  Mapping the relationship between personas illustrates which ones have influence, and how much, with the decision makers.

  CREATING AUDIENCE PERSONAS

  Meet Jeremy. He’s in his mid-30s and loves coffee. He has a great career going in the IT department of a fast-growing bank. Because his days are hectic, it’s easier for him to use email; the phone’s just another demand for his attention. He’s frustrated because his company is growing so fast that it’s difficult to keep up.

  Jeremy’s a family man, and he doesn’t want to spend all of his evenings and weekends working. But he’s concerned about his career and wants to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

  If you were going to give Jeremy a unique value proposition (UVP), what would it be? What matters to him is being effective. If he could be just 25% more effective at work, he’d feel like he was doing a better job of contributing. Plus, he wouldn’t be preoccupied with other things when he’s home with his family.

  Jeremy’s UVP is simple: Give me more time to be me. Forget about tryin
g to sell him features and benefits—talk to him in a way that makes your company matter to him. This is how you’re going to deliver value to him in a way that he cares about. After you have the essence of Jeremy squared away, think about who influences him. Enter influencer persona #1: Cheryl.

  Cheryl is the CFO for the bank and signs the checks for the providers that Jeremy picks. While Jeremy worries about being effective, Cheryl is more concerned with saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for the bank. How will you help her do that?

  Going one step further, what’s the one thing that matters most to Cheryl that doesn’t have anything to do with what you sell? Cheryl’s personal UVP: Make me a CFO rock star at my bank.

  You’re starting to see the connection, aren’t you? Stop and think: Who else in the ecosystem of people you deal with every day do you have an opportunity to influence?

  Dig deep into your persona to find out what matters to them most. Put your reporter’s hat on and start investigating—start looking for the real story. Find out what they’re emotionally attached to:

  • What does she do?

  • What does her day look like? Look into what kinds of frustrations, pressures, and concerns she has. What drives her? What needs does she have that aren’t being met?

  • Where is the gap in her needs/wants, even beyond your product or service?

  • When does she need to close the gap?

  • Why does she care about you, and not just your product or service?

  • How does she connect? Is it online or in person? Is it through white papers, research reports, or demos? Does she use a laptop or her smartphone?

  We once had a vice president for a client who traveled for 12 weeks to meet with customers. He wanted to see, hear, and experience firsthand what mattered most to the people his company tried hard to connect with every day.

  Here’s what he learned: 75% of the things his brand talked about had no relevance to what customers actually wanted. It just wasn’t valuable in their world.

  But through all of these personal conversations, and by being curious, the vice president discovered something very important. He learned that his company’s enterprise training program—a train-the-trainer program—delivered tremendous value to their customers.

  This vice president’s job all along had been to roll out software products. But once he knew what really mattered to customers, the company began to create a much more robust train-the-trainer program. It was a huge success, but it only happened because he took the time to get to know the brand’s customers, and those who influenced them, as people. That’s when the company was better able to serve buyers.

  JOURNEY + JOURNEYER: BUILDING THE BIGGER PICTURE

  As we’ve discussed, the sales funnel is no longer relevant and brands no longer guide the customer decision journey. Even though customers have access to a great deal of information, that doesn’t mean the information they access is relevant in those critical moments when they need to make decisions.

  Now more than ever, it’s important to understand your personas, their motivations, and the people who influence them. Put the parts and pieces together to build a bigger picture of the journey your customers move along to make a decision and the audience for whom you’re trying to create meaningful experiences. How does it all come together? It’s different for every brand.

  KEY CONCEPTS IN THIS CHAPTER

  • People experience a brand in numerous ways, many of which the brand cannot create or control. That is why it’s essential for marketers to understand that it’s the experience they create that matters most.

  • More than 100 years old, the sales funnel is no longer relevant to understanding how to connect with audiences. The customer controls the journey. Your role as a marketer is to take a holistic approach to understanding that journey, and create experiences to accompany it.

  • To build deeper relationships with audiences, brands have to create experience-driven touchpoints beyond what they sell. Consider the example of the Michelin Green Guides; their purpose isn’t to sell tires, but to help people with their travel plans.

  • Understanding and documenting buyer personas is more important than most marketers realize. You won’t be able to create relevant experiences for your buyers and those who influence them if you don’t have a deep understanding of who they are.

  ENDNOTES

  43 http://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure/ar/1

  44 Barry, Thomas. 1987. The Development of the Hierarchy of effects: An Historical Perspective. Current Issues and Research in Advertising, 251-295.

  45 http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?memid=692

  46 http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/the_consumer_decision_ journey

  47 http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/marketing-can-no-longer-rely-on-the-funnel/

  48 http://www.teslamotors.com/de_AT/forum/forums/tesla-isnt-just-car-or-brand-its-actually-ultimate-mission-mother-all-missions

  49 http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

  50 Interview with Carla Johnson, December 19, 2014.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Ibid.

  53 http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/marketing-can-no-longer-rely-on-the-funnel/

  54 http://www.viamichelin.com/

  55 https://www.siriusdecisions.com/Blog/2013/Jul/Three-Myths-of-the-67-Percent-Statistic.aspx

  56 Peterson, Erik and Riesterer, Tim. Conversations that Win the Complex Sale. The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2011.

  “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” | Jim Collins

  How do we evolve from good to great content-driven experiences?

  In the first chapter of one of the best business books of all time, Good to Great, author Jim Collins starts with a simple sentence, “Good is the enemy of great.”57

  Collins describes what he means by telling the story of a dinner he had with thought leaders. During the meal, one of the participants chided Collins by telling him how much he had enjoyed his first book, Built to Last, but that the major point was actually quite useless. Collins recounted what his dinner companion said:

  “…The companies you wrote about were, for the most part, always great. They never had to turn themselves from good companies into great companies. They had parents…who shaped the character of greatness from early on. But what about the vast majority of companies that wake up partway through life and realize that they’re good, but not great?”58

  This hits home for businesses that are attempting to either modify their existing marketing purposes, or completely upend existing content programs for something that is scalable to create experiences for their customers. With existing silos, processes, and business culture already in place, many marketers are wondering, “How can we evolve from good to great content marketing within our organization?”

  PURPOSE-DRIVEN CONTENT

  Every piece of content a business creates must have purpose. Ultimately, that purpose comes down to why and how the content is designed in order to change a behavior in the person who consumes it.

  Before we can create a purpose, we must believe in what we’re saying. However, truth and fact are very different things.

  Think about some of your own experiences with marketing. Here are some things we know to be true. We know that we’re not really going to drag and drop and edit presentations, or work on movies on our iPhone 6. The TV commercial showing people doing that on their iPhones makes it seem like it’s easy. All you have to do is tap with your finger, swipe over the graph, and everything will automatically be put into the keynote presentation on your tablet. But no one does that. It’s “true”—but, come on, it’s not really fact.

  We also know that when we have an unfortunate hotel situation, and we get that sympathetic Tweet from the hotel’s social media person, that it’s simply not a fact that they are “sorry to hear about our problems.” It’s “tru
e,” but the fact is they’re actually just trying to get our complaint to disappear from their screen as fast as possible.

  We also know, for a fact, that the classic Coca-Cola ad from the 1970s—that taught the world to sing—was completely contrived. That commercial was rehearsed for more than five hours before they shot it. And, yes, we also know that when we go to see The LEGO Movie that they’re actually trying to get us to buy more LEGOs.

  The point with all of this is, we don’t care. The iPhone 6 commercial is trying to persuade us. The hotel is trying to ameliorate us, the Coca-Cola ad is trying to engage us, and The LEGO Movie is trying to entertain us. But we don’t care because we’re finding value in the experience regardless.

  Marketers, we are not in the business of facts. We are in the business of what ought to be the truth.

  This might be best exemplified with the quote from Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, when she said, “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, magic. I try to give that to people…I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be the truth.”

  Facts are boring. Facts are commodities. Facts are not differentiating.

  CREATING VALUE WITH CONTENT